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A_Very_Nice_Dog's avatar

When I was in high school, a giant billboard sign went up on the main highway into my smallish hometown. It was a black field with white letters, and it just read, "Your wife knows," and it stayed up for a month. People began to speculate, and pretty soon the consensus was that it had to be someone about to be very publicly blasted for having an affair.

The next month, the same billboard, same styling, read, "Your neighbors know." Speculation continued, but by this point, people had started to actually make some guesses, mostly based on who would have the money to do something this public for this long.

Month three, the billboard read, "Everyone knows." And at this point, it was practically common knowledge among teachers and kids and parents, at work and in church, that it was Dr. M****s' wife, because he was surely a known philanderer and she was a merciless bitch who would absolutely drag him like this.

The fourth month, the billboard read, "Everyone knows that the best deals on a Toyota are at Riverside Toyota," and the whole town had slandered a man.

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Erik Petersen's avatar

My hometown has a mystery monkey colony that recently got a happy ending.

For about 70 years, there's been a colony of vervet monkeys that lives near Fort Lauderdale's airport, not far from the port and the beach. They'd occasionally cause trouble on the runway or at people's homes, but mostly they stayed away from people. They were well-known and part of local lore to the point that for years, the local teen get-up-to-no-good spot was unused scrubland near the port called Monkey Road. (It's been off limits since post-9/11 port and airport security tightening; one of the local breweries now makes Monkey Road Red.) Occasional stories about them were always vague on how they got there; sometimes it was a "roadside attraction" that they escaped from in the '50s, sometimes a zoo that closed in the '40s. Nobody ever seemed to know for sure how these monkeys got here.

Then, several years ago, scientists started studying them. And now, they're getting their own sanctuary, on land near where they've always lived. https://wsvn.com/news/special-reports/monkey-mission-dania-beach-wild-monkey-colony-finally-has-a-sanctuary-of-their-own/

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